


Backstitch

by MenaceAnon



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate universe: alternate universes, M/M, what genre is this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-18 21:22:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13108776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MenaceAnon/pseuds/MenaceAnon
Summary: It's not everyday that you fall in love. It's also not every day that your doppelgängers from a parallel universe show up, hand you super powers, and tell you to save the world.***This is the beginning of the end of the world: a hole in the sky, blinding gap-toothed eternity spewing enough electrical interference to fry every wire from Independence Hall to Fabric Row. Philadelphia judders to a halt, and Hercules Mulligan’s world turns upside down.Or maybe that’s jumping ahead. Because first there was this guy. French, yay tall, great hair, secretly a god damn Billionaire-with-a-capital-B-what-the-fuck. Not that that matters, right? It’s just that—Well, that’s getting ahead again.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nackledamia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nackledamia/gifts).



> Soooo... you are getting a first draft of a fic, instead of a polished product, because I am working three jobs and it's the holidays and I ran out of time and just finished this two minutes ago. Ergo, expect some real rough edges, especially in the second half. There is a not-too-high-but-still-non-zero chance that some day in the future there will be a nice pretty director's cut of this fic. But that day is not today.
> 
> Enjoy!
> 
>  **Warnings:** A very brief reference to homophobia, brief reference to animal cruelty, and comic book violence.
> 
> (And comic book logic. Don't... don't think too hard about how anything works.)

This is the beginning of the end of the world: a hole in the sky, blinding gap-toothed eternity spewing enough electrical interference to fry every wire from Independence Hall to Fabric Row. Philadelphia judders to a halt, and Hercules Mulligan’s world turns upside down.

Or maybe that’s jumping ahead. Because first there was this _guy_. French, yay tall, great hair, secretly a god damn Billionaire-with-a-capital-B-what-the-fuck. Not that that matters, right? It’s just that—

Well, that’s getting ahead again.

 _This_ is the beginning of the end of the world: the silver bells above Herc’s shop door brangle, a sweet minor chord, and this _guy_ and his indigo pea coat and his enormous champagne scarf Arrive. Hercules Mulligan’s world turns upside down.

That’s alright, though.

* * *

The pressure in the store shifts as the front door opens. The bells ring and a man gusts in with the cool air, and the whole shop rustles and resettles around him. Hercules tightens his lips around the pins and finds the newcomer in the angled mirrors — a broad back and coily hair over the top of the mannequin, by the shirt display. No one Hercules recognizes.

“Em-moh!” Hercules says loudly, and it almost sounds like a greeting. A sliver of bearded face appears as the man turns toward him in the mirror, and Herc wags his elbow.

“He’ll be right with you,” Peggy calls, as sweet as though she’s a fancy store greeter and not Hercules’s most unruly client. Case in point: he reaches for her and she cranks her head over her shoulder to look in the mirror, eyes locked on the sleek cream fabric where the jacket of the suit hugs her back.

“Ho’w _sti’w_.”

“Nnnn this looks so good. I am going to be the prettiest princess ever and it’s all your fault, Mulz. Angelica was right — do not tell her I said that — but _pantsuits_. Not just pantsuits: Mulligan originals. Eliza and Alex are inviting that fancy Lafayette prince-guy over while he’s in town and I’m gonna tell him about you. So just remember me when Canali snaps you up.”

Hercules gets her facing him again and quickly slips the final pins in place before stepping back to look her up and down. Carefully, because who the hell knows what all her squirming knocked loose. Nothing, as it turns out. Lucky. He centers the knot of her teal tie, and knocks her instep with the toe of his foot. “Pretty sure he’s not a prince. Also pretty sure that if you’re one of _those_ Lafayettes you already got a guy. Prob’ly they assign you a master tailor at birth.”

“Baby suits?”

“Baby suits.”

“You could make baby suits.”

The floor is creaky past the rack display, and a single light footstep turns Hercules around.

Peggy squeaks, “ _Hel_ -lo.” Hercules is inclined to agree.

The stranger is tall and trim, with his hair pulled back from the dark, open quicksilver of his eyes. Something about the smile under his perfectly trimmed beard suggests it gets a lot of use, and his shoulders are broad and military-straight in the fine wool of his coat. The pale gold ends of his scarf trail behind him, as glamorous as a cape.

Hercules is designing a suit for him before they’ve even said hello: Italian, slim fit to make his legs look a hundred miles long, the exact deep summer-night indigo of that coat or else _purple_ , yes, sharkskin, he could pull it off—

“Do you do men?” Mister Scarf asks, and Hercules’s needle skips out of the groove of his thoughts.

“He sure does,” Peggy supplies.

“Yeah, I mostly make men’s suits,” Hercules adds quickly, because sometimes Peggy forgets that he has to run a business and straight guys get jumpy about a bi man taking their inseam. She gets the hint and tamps her smile into a more neutral shape, and Hercules nods in her direction. “I switch it up now and then, though.”

“Not many can,” Mister Scarf says, and Hercules hears his accent now, blurring the heart of each word into something a little softer. German? No, French. The fancy kind of French. “Not like _that_ , certainly,” he adds, with a broad wave at Peggy. She starts to turn a circle but Hercules catches her shoulder and holds her still. She gives him a sheepish look.

“Not many are me,” Hercules begins, and scoops a ring of swatches off the hook on the wall.

Mister Scarf raps his knuckles twice on his thigh and declares, “I’ll take one.”

Sales pitch-interruptus, Hercules loses the thread again. “One what?”

“A suit. What do you think? Grey?”

 _Grey?_ “Hell no,” Hercules blurts, and Peggy goes _snurf_. Scarf’s eyebrows pop up. Hercules shakes his head and drags himself back to center. “I mean, if you’re looking for a grey suit I can make you a grey suit. I just think you’d look good in color. What did you have in mind?”

“Well,” Mister Scarf says, “it’s for a baby.”

He says it so lightly, expression so clear, that Hercules freezes, and he senses Peggy doing the same.

Scarf grins.

“Shit,” Hercules says, “I’m Hercules Mulligan, and that was amazing.” He grins, full-wattage, and holds out his hand.

Scarf’s eyes widen and his grin slips. He licks his lips and darts a look down to Hercules’s clothes — vest and slacks and the roll of his cuffs around his biceps. The shop is liquid-warm and quiet, until with a lurch Scarf clasps his hand in return.

“Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier,” he says in a rush, and then winces. His smile returns, faintly strained. “Just— just Gilbert,” he adds. “Please.” His palm is big and rougher than expected, and Something-te-Something-Gilbert du Motier’s index finger curls, warm, against Hercules’s wrist.

The handshake lasts too long. When they pull apart Hercules touches his wrist, over the lingering sense of fingertips against his skin.

“Let’s make you a baby suit,” Hercules says, and claps his hands together, and can’t seem to stop smiling.

* * *

Peggy, as she’s leaving, leans in and touches his shoulder. Her eyes land on du Motier, who is over by the belts while Peggy wraps up. “Thanks for everything, as always, Herc.” She pecks his cheek. “And good luck.” She dips out the door like a canary taking wing before he can parse her meaning

It takes them four hours to plan the suit, with a night-blue two-tone fabric that Hercules suspects will give Gilbert the faint aura of some evening deity.

Conversation with Gilbert is easy, and they lose another hour simply talking.

By the time they look up, a gloomy evening has snugged down into the streets beyond the shop windows, darkness interrupted occasionally by bald yellow streetlights. On the weekends Fabric Row pops to life, but tonight only a few clustered folks wind down the street.

Gilbert frowns at the dimness.

“You said you were gonna Uber?” Hercules asks.

“Mm. Yes.”

So Hercules finishes setting the shop to rights, locks up, and strikes up a conversation on the curb. Gilbert smiles, not fooled but also not insulted that Hercules doesn’t want him to wait out here alone, after dark, in such nice clothes.

They entertain themselves watching the Uber driver get very, very turned around, and fifteen minutes later Hercules has just about about decided that his paranoia was actually a bad case of wanting to be around Gilbert a little longer when he abruptly feels _watched_.

Just outside the circle of light at the street corner, not even ten feet away, a man is staring at them openly. He’s shorter than Hercules, and more slender — sleek really, with a narrow face, shaved head, and dark black skin. His clothing is fine but devoid of personality, a sea of charcoal, somehow incomplete.

His attention drags at Hercules like a thorn. Winter cold shears into his lungs and they lock closed. His chest hollows out around the hard, bumping lump of his heart. Something immense and colorless swims beneath the stranger’s eyes.

Hercules shies back toward Gilbert, shaking himself and gulping a breath, and then another. What the _fuck_. Gilbert is tugging his arm, fingers too tight and then _tighter_.

“Mulligan,” he says. Then, “Look _out_!”

Hercules turns, inhales, and ducks back from the liquid silver edge of a knife.

A prickling ache is scuttling across his arms, like he was laying on them. Hercules splays his fingers and then balls them into fists, flexing until the sensation rolls away. The man with the knife — white, skinny, pie-faced — lunges a second time.

And this, despite time and disuse, this Hercules has not forgotten.

Hips back, he catches the thrusting arm between his crossed wrists, knocking his attacker’s legs wide with the toe of his foot. A twist and he’s got the man hunched forward, arm back. Hercules rolls the knife out of his fingers, tosses it to the ground, and then lays his attacker out flat beside it.

Another body hits the ground seconds later. Hercule flinches, but looks up to find Gilbert kneeling on a man’s back, holding a knife in an easy icepick grip, the angle of his elbow belying a startling degree of competence. Their eyes meet and Gilbert is panting, but the savage curve of his teeth is a grin, not a grimace.

“You thought this was a good idea,” Hercules snarls at his attacker. The man grunts and curses as Hercules shoves his wrists toward his shoulder blades and kneels on them.

“Are you—” The memory of burning, ragged-edged eternity closing over his lungs. He glances at the street corner, but the man in grey is gone. Some sort of coordinated attack? And what _was_ that, before? But, no, Hercules didn’t recognize the man on the corner, but he has seen these two clowns around. “Were you trying to mug us?” From the corner of his eye he sees Gilbert give him a questing look, and maybe it is a strange question. What else would they be trying to do?

“Well I wasn’t trying to get my face slammed into the ground! This is assault!”

“Man, are you for real?” Hercules exhales, and reaches for his phone.

Officers Jane and Eddie arrive in their cruiser three minutes later, a full twenty seconds ahead of Gilbert’s wayward Uber. The latter is waved off, the trip cancelled and a nice tip wadded into the driver’s fist while Eddie cuffs the two muggers and packs them into the back of the police car. Jane takes their statements. Herc offers the officers coffee as they talk through procedure, because he knows Jane and Eddie, and they’re on the level.

When he mentions the man in grey to the police Gilbert starts nodding.

“I did not get a good look. His eyes were very strange, though,” he says.

“I didn’t realize you saw him. Glad you did, though,” Herc admits. “He was so weird for a second I thought maybe I dreamed him.”

“Did he look drugged?” Jane asks, teeth chewing into the well-gnawed end of her pen.

Hercules can only shrug.

It’s nearly eleven by the time they’re done. The police pull away and Hercules and Gilbert, left abruptly to their own devices, stare at one another.

“ _Putain de merde_ ,” Gilbert breathes at length.

“So,” Hercules says. “You’re pretty good in a fight.”

“I spent some time in _l’armée de terre_. What is your excuse?”

“I spent some time in the CIA,” he admits, and it’s worth the old familiar sting when Gilbert’s face opens with shock.

“You are a secret agent,” he says, with not a little delight.

“Was,” Hercules corrects.

Gilbert puts his finger on his nose and gives an exaggerated wink. “ _Was_ ,” he echoes. When Hercules huffs a laugh he adds, “Well, now we have fought side by side. That means we are friends! And friends get coffee together. What are you doing Saturday morning, Mister Secret Agent?”

Um. “Um. Working?”

“Can you make some time for me?”

Coffee. With Gilbert. “Yeah. Yeah, I can free up some time. Can you do early? Say, seven? I gotta open the shop by nine.”

“Of course.” Gilbert fiddles with his phone. “You are in my calendar, now, so there is no going back. I will meet you here?” A new, different Uber arrives, and as Gilbert scans the driver and the car and the plates, Hercules scans Gilbert.

This might be a mistake. But Hercules Mulligan doesn’t fear the odd mistake. Usually.

“I look forward to it,” he says, and Gilbert flashes him a shining grin, ducks into the car, and vanishes into the night.

* * *

Gilbert arrives at the shop Saturday morning with his hair down, and the frame of his springy afro around his face is leonine and beautiful. He’s wearing a belted dark suede trench coat and mustard scarf over a grey sweater and handmade shoes, and altogether looks as though he fell off the cover of _L’Officiel_. Hercules isn’t outclassed, precisely — everything he has on is handmade, and he knows exactly how good he looks wearing it — but Gilbert smells, unmistakably, like money. This is not news, of course, and he’s far from Herc’s only wealthy customer. “In the know” millionaires keep the lights on. But Gilbert dropped four grand on what looked an awful lot like a whim, and didn’t even blink. Even the Schuylers are more strategic when clothes shopping.

Rich, male, a _client_ , and headed back to France long term sometime in the immediate future. _It’s not happening, Hercules._

Gilbert smiles at him, and Hercules thinks, _Oh no_. Then Gilbert looks down, and blinks into a frown.

“You have, ah, a pigeon.”

Hercules follows his gaze down to where the blue and silver pigeon is huddled flush against his shoe.

“Aw, that’s just Cooper,” he says.

“Cooper. He is yours?”

Hercules shrugs, and drops the final blueberries to the ground. Cooper detaches himself from Hercules’s foot just long enough to peck them up, then returns to his warm spot once again.

“He lives on top of the door, there.” He points to the windowed recess above the shop entrance. “Can’t go too far even if he wanted to — his right wing’s all a mess. I caught some kids tying him up with twine and kicking him around. I chewed them all to hell, then nursed poor Cooper back to health.” Herc dusts his hands together and tries not to fidget. He tries to remember the last time he felt the urge to fidget. “People think of pigeons as flying rats, but,” he waves, “they’re just trying to live their lives. Despite us, most times. Makes no sense to hate ‘em just for that.”

Before Hercules’s rambling can devolve any further, Gilbert, of all things, crouches, holds out a hand, and _ticks_ his tongue softly. Cooper turns his head to the side, one dark eye fixed on Gilbert’s open hand. He shuffles a few clawed steps forward, fluffs up, grunts quietly, and then turns away, back to Hercules’s foot.

Du Motier’s shoulders quiver and his head drops down, chin to his chest as he shakes it back and forth. His eyes are scrunched around a laugh when he raises it. “I understand,” he says. “What does he eat?”

“Uh. Berries. Seeds and grains. Greens. Bugs, sometimes.”

Gilbert is nodding along, as though Hercules has said something wise.

“You have a good soul, Monsieur Mulligan.”

“Dunno about that.” Hercules rubs the back of his neck. “Please, call me Hercules.”

“Then you should call me Gil,” he says, standing, and Herc runs that over his tongue: _zheel_. “Alright! Coffee.”

Hercules, feeling whimsical, brings him to the Hungry Pigeon and feels disproportionately pleased when Gil’s lips twitch up.

They slide into the chairs of the intimate little table by the windows, framed by an array of lush succulants, and promptly sit in awkward silence for about five minutes, followed by five more minutes of awkward scrambling for a topic, any topic. They fall on books, eventually, and somehow Gil admits that he was a terrible student and mostly learned English by reading science fiction. (“Which is why, to this day, when I try for a true American accent I sound like a very stoned John Wayne,” he confesses, and Hercules aspirates his hot chocolate laughing.) From there the conversation churns along so easily that one hour becomes two, and Hercules has to leave or else he will be late opening the shop.

“How long are you in town?” he asks.

“Well,” Gil says, “for a little while yet, I think.”

“If you’re still around next week, hit me up. I’ll show you around the city some.”

“Yes? I could use a native guide! You must go now, though?”

“I’ve got a client coming in for a fitting at ten, and then my buddy Alex needs me to be in the store so he can pick up a suit ‘some time this morning.’ He’s going to a dinner party with this stodgy old French lord guy tonight.” Gil’s face twitches, and Hercules curses his lack of tact. _Insult a French person in front of the French person._ He knows how people talk, and doesn’t want to be that guy. “Nothing against the man. I don’t think he planned the party. Maybe he’d rather be at home eating takeout in his bathrobe.” _Holy shit stop rambling._

Gil sets his espresso down, so delicately it doesn’t make a sound. Hercules feels like there’s some sort of novel written in his tiny smile, a complicated brick of a book, and all in a language he doesn’t speak. French, maybe. Maybe Hercules should learn to speak French.

“Cheese,” Gil says, eventually. “He is French after all. At home eating _cheese_ in his bathrobe.”

The unaccountable tension in Hercules’s back twigs gratefully loose. “I defer to your experience.”

They finish their drinks, and shake hands, but as Herc jogs to the shop to make his appointment his belly is heavy.

They made no plans to meet again, and he knows that’s it. One coffee, cut painfully short. The suit they designed could take a full year to make, though he knows himself, knows he’s excited about the project and will probably finish sooner. Maybe, in that time, Gil will fly back to the states for a fitting, but more likely Hercules will ship the suit to France without seeing him again. Maybe they will exchange polite emails.

He thinks about their conversation: science fiction, impossible adventure stories. In another life, in an alternate universe somewhere tucked parallel to his own, Hercules’s father is still alive, and Hercules did not have to leave his budding career in the Agency to come home and take up the family business, raise his brother. Maybe that version of Hercules is refined and sophisticated and worldly. Maybe he’s the sort of man who could fit into Gil’s life.

He exhales, dropping a few crumbs from his muffin for Cooper, then takes the jagged sphere of keys on a ring and unlocks the door of his shop, raises the lights, and flips the sign.

Mulligan Tailoring and Adustments, open for business.

* * *

Thursday is chilly and grey, and every time the front door opens Hercules’s ears twinge at the pressure shift. Near closing, the bells jingle, and Hercules pops his head up from where he’s reorganizing shirts.

He tells himself he’s not looking for anyone specific.

He’s certainly not looking for the man who appears: dark and sleek with hair cropped close to the skull, a dove gray jacket over charcoal and more charcoal, and a lingering, unquenchable sense of _incompleteness_. The newcomer trails long fingers over the hanging tails of belts, and looks up when Hercules approaches but doesn’t meet his eye.

“It’s you,” Hercules blurts.

The stranger from the street corner blinks, standing otherwise too-still. His lips twitch, human and dry, and the tight knot in Hercules’s chest loosens. For a moment he’d been expecting something else. Something— something empty and full of ice. He wants to laugh at himself for even thinking it. What had he seen that night? Just a man on the street corner.

“It is me,” the stranger agrees.

“You saw us get jumped the other night.”

He doesn’t deny it. “You’re not hurt?”

Relief warps into annoyance. _This guy_. Hercules reminds himself that normal people don’t go jumping into random street fights, though, and sometimes they even run away. Too, Hercules and Gil did so much damage so quickly that it’s entirely possible this stranger didn’t even have _time_ to help.

Caution, Hercules decides, but not hostility.

“I’m alright,” Hercules confirms, and the man nods, chin touching the collar of his coat. “Alive and well, and this is my shop. So, welcome.” He crawls under the blanket of service, letting automatic courtesy take over, and extends a hand. “Hercules Mulligan. What’s your name, man?”

The effort receives another too-long, unnecessarily dramatic pause. Then, finally, quietly, “Burr. I’m Burr,” he says, “And I’d like you to make me something.” He doesn't take the offered hand.

Hercules lets it drop. “Something specific?” he asks, and okay, maybe he doesn’t do such a great job of suppressing the faint droll note in his voice, judging by the faint crinkling around the stranger’s eyes. His clothes are fine, and fit him well, but they’re careworn and somewhat out of date, and, strangely, as Hercules continues his inspection, he sees that some of the edges are unfinished. As though abandoned partway through. Or as though they’re still in the process of being made.

Not everyone is Gil. Sometimes, people come in who need suits — or simple tailoring — that they cannot afford. Usually for job interviews. They come to Hercules because they know he’ll help them out wherever he can. Maybe that’s why Burr is here.

Hercules purses his lips. There’s an old look book on the edge of the counter, a heavy binder full of the things he has made over the years. He scoops it up and drops it into Burr’s arms.

“Tell me if anything in here catches your eye, and we’ll see what we can do. I think you’d look good in burgundy, maybe a shirt, you know, I have one…” He eyes the stack of shirts he was adjusting before Burr walked in, but the exact shirt isn’t there. _It’s in the back._

Burr blinks. He stares at Hercules for a moment, and then, with the funny little look, opens the book. His fingers slip beneath the heavy plastic pages, lifting and dropping, lifting and dropping.

He says, “You’re a creator. Anything you imagine, you can create from cloth.” _Shiff_ , and the page drops. “You’re more artful than the other, though.”

Hercules frowns. “The other tailors on the street are brilliant. They just do different stuff.”

“Yes,” Burr says. He sounds abstracted. “Exactly.”

What.

It feels like Burr is having his own private conversation and Hercules is only half-invited. Desperate to force some sense into things, he says, “Here, I’m having a thought,” and reaches out toward Burr.

Herc’s hand doesn’t reach him. Burr dips back, just out of reach. The motion is graceful, but undeniably urgent, a sort of anxious bob. _Don’t touch_. It reminds Hercules of something, but he can’t place it.

Right. “I’m gonna go grab a shirt,” Hercules says, “I think you’ll like it.” He ducks into the back room, and exhales. This is the most unbearable interaction Hercules has had in a very long time, and he takes the moment of peace to regroup, find the thread of his thoughts and follow it.

 _Start with getting the man some clothes_.

He retrieves the burgundy shirt, about Burr’s size. It would look especially good under all that grey, and with a few quick alterations would fit him like a glove. With luck, this conversation is almost over.

But when he gets back out into the store Burr is gone.

He didn’t even hear the bells chime. The last fingers of sunlight fall low through the windows, catching dust.

The shirt flutters to the table. Hercules jogs to the door and cranks it open directly into Gil’s face.

Gil hobbles back, eyes big above the hand pressed to his nose.

“Shit! Are you okay?”

“Um!” Gil says, pulling his hand away from his nose a little too fast. “Yes! Where— er, were you leaving? I can, I can come back.”

“Back?” Hercules feels his brain yank sharply in two separate directions. “You’re Burr. I mean, you’re back! Hi! Uh— Did you see—” He glances up and down the street, but Burr isn’t anywhere. He rasps his hand over his hair.

“Were you chasing someone?”

“It was that guy from the other night, on the street corner? But I didn’t think…”

 _Could_ there be a not-so-innocent reason Burr didn’t help them when they were attacked? That was absurd, right?

Hercules ducks back inside, opening the till. It’s untouched, and a quick look around shows that none of the more expensive suits or shirts or shoes are missing. He turns in a circle, frowning.

“Did he take something?”

“No, I don’t… I don’t think he did. I think he just ducked out while I was in the back. I guess he changed his mind about wanting me to make him something. Or maybe he saw the prices. S’a shame — I coulda helped him out if he needed.”

“Strange.”

“Yeah.”

Hercules blinks. “So uh. What can I help you with?”

“Yes, I forgot. The other day. I saw you had a belt that I wanted to buy. And, ah, and also I brought this,” he adds, and pulls a bagful of gold millet stalks out of his jacket pocket, like a magician. “The finest seed in all the land. Or that is what the lady at the store said.”

Seed. The man brought _seed_.

“Are these for Cooper?”

“No, I just like to have seed nearby,” he quips, eyes sparkling.

Cooper, never far, flutters awkwardly up to their feet at the sound of his name, making a squat little ‘feed me!’ noise. He waddles to Hercules, beady eye fixed on his hands.

“Not me, pal, you gotta ask Gil. He’s the one with the goods.”

“May I?” Gil asks, and when Hercules nods he crouches, the knee of his expensive-looking jeans touching the sidewalk. Making soothing noises, he spills some seed on the ground and then backs away again. Cooper gives him his most suspicious pigeon stare, head turned so one dark eye can scan him up and down. He does not look away, but takes a waddling step, and then another, until he’s just beyond arm’s reach of Gil. Gil stays perfectly still until Cooper finishes the pile of millet, then reaches out to drop some more — too fast. Cooper bobs away. _Don’t touch_.

Hercules blinks.

“He’ll warm to you,” Hercules murmurs, “especially if you keep bringing him food.”

“You and I have that in common,” Gil tells Cooper, and carefully spills more seed onto the ground. “Ah, in fact, maybe you can help me!” He peeks up at Hercules, all long lashes and dark eyes. “I want to try my first cheesesteak, but I have received conflicting advice. Should I go to Geno’s, or Pat’s?”

“Geno’s or Pat’s?” Hercules echoes, incredulous, and that’s how they end up at Delassandro’s, because obviously no one else in the city can be trusted to guide the man to a proper sandwich.

Herc orders _two, American, wit_ , and Gil declares the cheesesteak the most disgustingly delicious thing he’s ever had. _God bless America_. Gil then insists on trying Budweiser, despite repeated warnings, and grimaces stubbornly all the way to the bottom. _God bless America._ Hercules gets to hear the “stoned John Wayne” accent and is badgered into admitting that it is exactly as bad as Gil thinks. He lounges like a bored prince, so that even the cracked faux-leather booth looks decadent, streetlight falling in a broad swath over his face. Hercules is careful not to stare.

It’s not until they part ways that Hercule realizes Gil never bought his belt. So when Gil turns up again a few days later, it’s not as surprising. This time, Hercules helps him find the belt first, all shining black-and-white shagreen, unique and expensive and perfect for Gil in every way, but Hercules could swear he sees the man’s face fall, briefly, when they pluck it out from amid all the other belts.

Gil is back three days later for an oxblood tie that he spotted while they were finding the belt, and they make plans to meet at the Morning Glory Diner for lunch that Tuesday, which turns into coffee on Monday, and a trip to the Reading Terminal Market on Thursday.

He brings Cooper blueberries and snap peas and spinach and more millet, until the little bird charges over the minute he arrives, crowding eagerly around his ankles.

And he smiles at Hercules, and they’re friends, and that’s enough. Really, it is.

* * *

“Penn’s Landing,” Hercules says. “I feel like a tourist.”

“I am a tourist!” Gil announces, loud enough that some folks on the boardwalk turn to look. He throws himself against the concrete rail, eyes bright and devious as he stares out over the water. “And I wish to do tourist things. Now how do we get onto the old _sous-marin_?”

The day is clear and warm, summer’s last twirl before fall’s feet really hit the dance floor, and the waterfront is crowded. Gulls turn overhead, and bass-boosted rap — live — rolls from the trees of Spruce Street Harbor Park down to the brightly colored line of cargo containers all retrofitted into little walk-up restaurants. Hercules has an appointment later with some funnel cake, preferably one drowning in an obscene amount of powdered sugar, but that will have to wait until they’re sitting down and out of the gusty breeze off the water.

Gil’s indigo coat has made a reappearance, though it hangs open, and Herc follows the line of it over rolling muscle to where Gil is pointing out into the harbor.

“The submarine?” he asks, sees Gil’s lips move around the word and knows he’ll never forget it. “You gotta buy tickets. Probably. Uh, somewhere.”

“You are a terrible native guide.”

Hercules grins. “You want me to just start making shit up?” he asks, and then cackles, because Gil looks delighted at the very idea.

The self-proclaimed tourist reels about until he finds a sign full of bright pictures and equally bright copy all about the ships tucked together against the dock. He scans it avidly. Hercules is accumulating evidence that lurking not-so-deep below Gil’s effortless European glamour is a giant, hopeless nerd. He smiles to himself, and shoves his hands in his pockets.

“The submarine is the _Becuna_ , and the ship there,” Gil points to the white and red cruiser docked parallel with the black sub, “she is the _Olympia_. But what about the, the… _grand voilier_ , _euh_ … Mast? Masted ship?” He jabs a finger toward the shiny black sailing ship, resting apart from the other two. “That.”

“That’s not a museum, it’s the _Moshulu_. It’s a restaurant.”

“The ship is a _restaurant_?” He raps his hand against his thigh, and Hercules can guess what he’s about to say next. Sure enough: “We must eat there.”

“Later, though. I can’t let some fancy food spoil my appetite for fried garbage.”

“Of course,” Gil agrees breezily.

Hercules thumps Gil’s shoulder. As he does, his eyes skip over the crowd.

Three seagulls stand rock-still in the center of the boardwalk — nothing too unusual, except they’re in a line, pressed wing-to-wing-to-wing, heads up but not looking around. Foot traffic flows around them. A few people peer at them as they walk by, but when a little girl reaches toward their white heads they don’t even twitch. Her mother tugs her away.

“What about that one?” Gil calls, and Hercules blinks, turning. Gil is pointing again, this time past the harbor, far across to the distant, immense gray battleship on the New Jersey side of the river. Her guns rise like claws out of a stocky tower, faintly menacing even through the aura of retirement.

“S’the Battleship _New Jersey_ , I think.”

“From what I hear, you Americans should probably not be giving New Jersey its own battleship.”

“That’s a really good fuckin’ point.”

“I know!”

They get funnel cake, and eat it in the park, under the colored lights that hang like bright streaks of rain from the trees. When they’re both sugar-sticky and pleased with themselves they splash their hands in a drinking fountain, drop their bodies into — and then out of — the slouchy mesh hammocks strung all about, then sit on the edge of the stage with the rapper between sets and chat with her for a time.

Eventually Gil says “What’s over there?” and reaches, and their fingers wind together.

Gil’s smile over his shoulder is soft and cozy-warm, and he tows Hercules up Dock Street to Walnut, away from the river and into Old City. Down a ways, the low white bell tower of Independence hall sits apart from the newer, taller architecture. Gil waves toward it. “I want to see the giant bell!”

His eyes are dark and something bubbles up behind the plate of Herc’s breast. It says _What if?_. And then it says, _Why not?_

And Hercules is talking, staggering through a sentence before he can change his mind, saying, “Hey, Gil, I got a question. For you. Today.”

Gil looks at him over his shoulder, lips pressed into the high collar of the coat. He stops walking and turns all the way around, eyes bright and searching. His hand curls tighter.

“Hercules!”

They both jump. He could swear Gil’s face falls, for just a heartbeat.

Hercules frowns, scanning the crowd. A slim arm stuck high in the air waves at him, and he follows it down to Peggy. She grins, clutching two narrow, mustard-slathered pretzels, and when he lifts his chin at her she trots toward them, already talking.

“Herc, hi! Isn’t it great out today? I’m glad you got out of the shop.” She gestures her pretzels about and draws a breath to continue when Gil turns toward her and she grinds to an abrupt stop, mouth still open. And then she says, “Lafayette!”

 _Lafayette_.

“Hi! How've you been?"

"Well," Gil says stiffly. "Very well, thank you."

Oh my god, Herc, I’m sure he told you but it was so funny when Laf showed up at Alex’s party that Saturday. I mean, mortifying, obviously,” she directs this to Gil. “I can’t believe you heard us talking about you in Herc’s shop that day. But Herc, I saw him and blurted out ‘Baby-suit guy!’ and Angelica and Eliza thought I was having a stroke.” Hercules can see her pride: Peggy Schuyler had an inside joke with the guest of honor at a major shindig. The littlest Schuyler prevails against her older, louder sisters. Hercules wants to be excited for her. He really does.

He’s struggling.

Peggy continues, “I thought you said at the party that you were going back to France. Like, weeks ago.”

Gil’s posture has gone military straight, and he’s not looking at Hercules.

“I have been back and forth.” _Wait, what?_ “But something came up here, so I will be in Philadelphia for, for a little longer, at least.” Gil’s eyes flit to Hercules and away again.

Hercules entertains the idea that this is some simple failure of communication, a misunderstanding. Maybe Peggy is confused, and Gil isn’t some Extremely Important French Lord, and Herc still has a sliver of a chance at a relationship with this man—

Maybe Gil didn’t intentionally mislead Hercules.

 _Right_.

Gil meets his eyes and his lips move, like he wants to say something, but Peggy is here and yeah, Herc doesn’t want to talk about this with an audience.

When he looks back to Peggy he finds her staring at their hands where they’re still linked together. Hercules gently pulls free. He scrunches his fingers and then splays them wide.

A cloud crosses the sun, and a sudden icy breeze lashes their coats. The whole street seems to rustle around them, and Peggy tugs the daffodil-colored fabric of her coat tighter. “Eesh, cold.”

“You jinxed it, Pegs,” Hercules says.

“You can’t let the universe boss you around, just because it’s out to get you.” Her eyes flit down to their hands again. “Uh, you know actually,” Peggy says, “I’ve gotta go. I’ve got uh, SoulCycle. Soon. Gotta get home and put on my workout clothes!”

“Yeah,” Herc agrees, “you don’t want to be late.” Gil — Lafayette — frowns.

“You guys have fun, okay? Um. I’ll see you around?”

They make the proper goodbyes, and when Peggy disappears east, toward Independence Hall, Hercules drags a hand over the crown of his head, down his neck, then pinches his ear. _Exhale_. The smell of the city picks up on the sudden, chilly breeze.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I….” Gil scrubs his palm against his thigh. He doesn’t deny anything. “You seemed to have an idea about who ‘Lafayette’ is, and I… didn’t want to be that. To you. That is all. I panicked. And after I misled you, I was not sure how to fix it. But I have not pretended with you. What would my title have told you that my friendship did not?”

 _It would have told me I never had a chance_. Hercules scrapes the ball of his thumb against the grain of his eyebrow. His little seed of hope dies on the sidewalk.

“I don’t like to be misled,” he says.

Gil is watching him closely, with the whole sky in his deep black eyes. “Hercules,” he says.

Something wobbles out of place in Hercules’s chest, like a bubble trapped against his ribs, sliding up, and he catches a hand against his heart. His ears pop as the pressure shifts, and somewhere, a low bell rings.

It’s not until someone starts screaming that Hercules realizes it’s not just _him_.

Gil’s head is tipping back, eyes enormous, and in them the clear sky is shredding. Hercules lurches around.

Streaming threads of sky peel away, as though someone has taken a seam ripper to reality. What’s revealed beyond is— His eyes skid away, stomach pitching upward to sour in his throat. Nothing. Behind them is _nothing_ , vast nothing. Cold shears into Hercules’s lungs and he cannot breathe.

A dismal grey whine swallows the world, an immense wall of sound that vibrates in the cavity of his chest and rolls like a ball against his jugular. His head goes light. There, within in the _nothing_ , _something_ moves.

Icy air snaps the ends of Herc’s coat against his thighs as the whine fizzles out.

A person shoves past them, then another, and Hercules and Gil flatten themselves into the recessed window of a pizzeria. First a trickle, then a stream, and then a river of people rush past, going east toward the Delaware, or south, or north, or any direction that leads away from the open end of infinity looming above the tower of Independence Hall. Gusting wind rocks the bell in its tower: _gung, g-gung_.

Gil grabs Hercules’s arm in a grip so hard it aches. “ _Peggy_ ,” he says.

“She could have run past us,” Hercules says, but not because he believes it.

“We should run,” Gil says. One look at his face and Hercules can see the light in his eyes, the tension of an eager greyhound straining his shoulders.

“We should,” Hercules agrees. “We don’t want to be in the way of emergency personnel.”

The knuckles of Gil’s free hand knock against his thigh, _rap-rap_ , _rap-rap_ , rhythmic as a pounding heart. Hercules can hear the blood rushing in his own ears. _G-gung-ung._

Movement catches his eye, a dark shape walking counter to the crush of human terror, sleek head held high, dove gray coat trailing. The crowd parts around him, and Hercules thinks of seagulls, thinks of a knife in the dark.

Thinks of Cooper.

“Burr! Burr, what the fuck are you doing! What is he…”

The monster lurking on the other side of the gap in the sky _whines_ again, a crushing body of noise.

Hercules twists to look at Lafayette, clutches his hands into fists and opens his mouth.

Gil is watching Burr as well, but then his eyes dart to Hercules. He points after him.

 _Yes_ , Hercules mouthes.

Gil nods. He grabs Hercules’s hand, squeezes it, then pulls it to the back of his blue coat and presses his fingers closed around the fabric.

Heat surges in Hercules, and he scoops up a handful of indigo wool. Gil presses his fingers again, _Hold on tight_. Hercules does.

They dodge into the crowd, trotting with the stream, edging toward the places where it runs thin and then turning, and moving counter. People do not part for them the way they did for Burr, and Hercules staggers as three consecutive bodies slam his shoulder. He dodges sideways as men come trotting through on horses, and nearly loses his grip on Gil’s coat. They would have been mowed down entirely except that the press of bodies is thinning out.

The buzzing whine scratches into silence, finally. Hercules shakes himself all over, trying to dispel the hum still clinging to his skin.

They’re closing with Burr when suddenly the man’s head bobs once, twice, and then vanishes. They stagger out of the crowd, and Lafayette breathes a curse.

Abandoned horse buggies line the street to their left. Past the buggies is a treed lot with a statue of a man clutching a quill and holding a scroll to the sky — Signers Garden. On the next block is Independence Hall.

The Hall is an old building, and its tower is not particularly high. Bleak infinity sits not-particularly-high above that. Hercules gulps against bile as the immense thing swims behind the small, gut-churning tear in the sky. His hindbrain is gibbering at him, _Too close too close too close_. But he needs to be sure—

“It will not even turn on,” Lafayette says. Hercules looks around to find that Gil has his phone out, and is snarling quietly at it in french before shoving it back in his pocket.

A plunging crack like bone-snap explodes under the trees to their left. Icy air blasts out of Signer’s Garden. A person-sized oval of milky glass hovers in the air before the statue, and Hercules blinks, staring through it. Was that how the statue looked: a man holding a lantern and a scroll?

The edges of the glass burn with jade light, and the grass below that light cracks and blackens and turns to gusting ash. The glass warps, and Hercules’s inner ear swoops so badly that he and Lafayette fall together, clutching. The warping worsens before abruptly stabilizing.

With a short, crystalline ping, the pale glass fractures and blasts out toward them. Two men come falling through. They stagger and find their feet, and then lift their heads. The rush of _everything_ cranks to a sudden stop.

When Hercules was a kid he and his brother would play superheroes. They had their own characters, and designed their own costumes, which pops made for them by hand and they wore together trick-or-treating three years in a row. They were cheesy, brightly-colored things, with Zorro-masks and broad red and blue capes, but Hercules can remember being nine and looking at himself in the mirror and feeling like he could save the whole world.

There are no capes here, no masks. It’s not even cheesy. But it _is_ Hercules, all in body armor the color of a storm at sea, with orange-gold lines along his throat and at the V of his waist that look like they might be insignia. Pale grey spiderwebs of light twist around his fingers and palms, crawling and crackling up his wrists.

Hercules wraps his arms around himself, and wonders what ever happened to the accompanying feeling of power.

“ _La vache_.”

The real world pops back into place at the sound of Gil’s voice, and Hercules notices the second man who came through the — portal, it’s a portal, Hercules didn’t read all that science fiction to _not_ recognize a portal when he sees one. The second man is _Gil_ , all in kevlar the color of port wine with cream insignia, with his hair down and chest heaving hard.

The portal is gone and the statue is back to clutching a scroll and a quill, and okay, Hercules knows what’s happening here. He’s pretty sure he might be in a coma and this is all a wild dream and maybe he’ll wake up when he falls into the pig pen or something, but he can’t be accused of not knowing his tropes.

So when the superhero version of himself says, “This may be confusing,” Hercules tells him, “If you’re me from an alternate universe, then not really.”

“See James,” says alternate-Gil to alternate-Hercules, who is apparently _James_. “If there was gonna be one constant across universes, of course it’s that you’re a huge nerd.” He has a perfect American accent, even tinged faintly by the south. Nothing like stoned John Wayne. Somehow his voice seems lower, growlier this way. “Anyway, this is where you say ‘Thank you, Thomas, for breaking every rule of physics, including the ones you and I just rewrote and published two years ago, the science journals are all gonna hate us again but hey, you got us here alive.’ Oh. Shit look out!”

A blazing white column the size of a tree trunk slams down on the statue. Bronze crumples and the stone plinth shatters. Granite shards spray, a chunk clipping Hercules at the temple. He staggers backward and all four of them pour out onto the cobbled street, ducking down behind the carriages. James extends a hand and a horse all made of snapping grey threads of light forms beneath a yoke, rears, and charges down the street.

“Hold very still,” James orders, voice cool.

Another white column punches down on the heels of the fleeing carriage, then another, following it as it peels too fast around a corner, tipping sideways but remaining on its wheels to clatter south down Independence.

Hercules traces the line of the columns up to the sky, to where they reach out of the portal like groping fingers. Smaller white tendrils are tugging at the edges of the tear, ripping at the edges. Making it big enough for the thing lurking on the other side. Terror spikes down his spine. Inhale. Exhale. Lafayette at his side (at both of his sides) and the earthy smell of horse manure. _Panic later_.

“Alright. You’re us from an alternate universe,” and he’ll think about what it means, later, that they came through together. “You have super powers. What about you?” he looks at Thomas.

“I, too, have ‘super powers,’” he drawls.

“Alright. So then you can probably tell me what the hell _that_ is?” he says, and points at the sky. He finds James’s eyes over Thomas’s shoulders.

“ _That_ is a mistake we made.”

“We who.”

Even crouched on the filthy ground James is so still, so cool. Hercules feels rough just looking at him. “My name is James Madison. He is Thomas Jefferson.” Jefferson wiggles his fingers in a wave. “We’ve spent the last decade and a half working under Director Maria Lewis to study the multiverse — the layering of realities one on top of another, each one subtly different.” He folds his hands together, the palm of the left over the back of the right, like stacked papers. “Our specialty is the barrier between those worlds: a plane of nothingness that holds the different worlds separate, so they do not tangle together.” He lifts his left hand so that a sliver of air sits between it and the right. “There is nothing, in that barrier. Not heat nor cold nor light nor dark. And certainly not anything _alive_.” He frowns, and looks at the gash in the sky.

The white tendrils fidget around the shredding tear, peeling it very slowly wider.

“I looks very alive to me,” Lafayette mutters.

“Are you French?” Thomas asks.

Lafayette blinks at him. “ _Ouais_?”

Thomas smirks, but James sets a hand on his arm and he subsides. James does not pull his hand away. His thumb strokes, just once, over Thomas’s elbow.

“Director Lewis, in her efforts to study the void, breached the wall between it and our universe and sent a probe through. It beamed us data through the breach for months, but then, to avoid destabilizing the barrier, Director Lewis closed the breach. She did not retrieve the probe, assuming it would be destroyed when there was no longer a link to our world to support its existence. Instead it sat, like a burr in the lining of the universe. Catching scraps of reality every time we poked our heads through to look. Bending bits of existence around itself, over and over and over again. Consuming _actuality_ , until it became _something_ inside of all that nothing. It’s been growing in there for thirty-odd years. Waiting. Waiting, until it figured out how to tear through the veil, and now it has come to consume, to collect your world around itself in an effort to be more real.”

Hercules feels his ass hit the cobbles, back propped against the bright-painted wall of a carriage.

“Why here?” Lafayette asks. “Why not your world?”

Thomas shrugs, the gesture lacking Gil’s easy fluidity. “It’s not closer to our universe than to yours.”

“How are you going to fix this?” Gil demands.

Thomas and James exchange a look.

Hercules looks up.

A blazing white leg hurtles toward them, immense. He shouts, loud, grabs Gil, but there’s no way to move in time, no way to—

The ground drops out. He’s falling down — no — his inner ear lurches as gravity wrenches sideways and he pitches forward, crashing face-first into a flowering bush. A strong arms tugs him to his feet.

“Hello darlin’,” Jefferson murmurs in his ear, grinning at him. Heat washes over Hercules, displacing the traces of nausea, but he ignores it and twists around.

He can see Signer’s Garden from here, the crushed buggy where they were an instant ago. It’s a full block away. They’re in a swath of bushes beside a familiar tall bank of windows framed on the top edges by steel. Beyond the windows is an immense bronze bell with a long dark fissure running two thirds of the length.

Beside them, a mirror-like portal snaps closed with a crackle. Thomas lowers one of his hands, the one not wound around Hercules.

Thomas rolls his head on his neck, lets Hercules go, and looks around, eyes suddenly cold. Hercules can see it in him now, the chill calculation where Gil burns warm.

“We need to close that portal before the burr gets through,” he says to James. “Or all of this was for nothing. We’ll destroy any pieces that are already here, then figure out how to get back home.”

“Us,” James says slowly, “and what army?”

Slowly, they turn to look at Hercules and Gil.

Hercules frowns, not missing the pass. “We don’t have super powers.”

Madison exhales. He goes still, hands behind his back, a blue-grey column but for the gold in straight lines at his throat and hips. For a beat, Hercules is certain that James Madison is shorter than him. He seems compact, as though all of Hercules has been pressed and tightened and neatened at the seams. But their eyes are level, their shoulders the same width. Madison is simply… intensified, a narrowed beam of light.

 _I could never be this_ , Hercules thinks.

“Genetically, we are identical,” Madison begins. “Therefore—”

An enormous scraping roar cuts the quiet as one trunk-like white arm plows a trough through the cobbled streets. It twists, and punches into the side of a building. They crouch down into the bushes and Hercules feels distinctly hunted.

Thomas says, “Jemmy. Giant void monster. We need the short version.”

Madison’s wide lips press into a line. Jefferson smiles benignly. Hercules is aware of Lafayette watching them closely, his sharp eyes on Jefferson as the man leans into Madison’s space, the way Madison relaxes as they draw together.

“I can give you powers,” Madison says. “If you want them. And you can save the world. It's dangerous—”

“Yes.”

They all turn. Lafayette’s jaw is squared, his eyes burning.

“Yes,” he repeats, when he sees them staring. “You ask me: do I want the power to help. The answer is yes. It will always be yes.”

Something deep in Hercules quivers, vibrating at some frequency above his hearing but perfectly, elementally in tune with the note of tension in Gil’s voice. _Yes_ , it says, _yes yes yes_.

Down the street, the sound of this creature tearing up his city. Hercules squares his shoulders, and meets James Madison’s unfamiliar eyes.

“The hell are you waiting for?”

Madison blinks. Even Thomas looks surprised.

“They made that decision about three years faster than we did,” Jefferson mutters. Then, “Hold out your hands, Ur-James is going to give you super powers and it’ll be easier for him to do with physical contact.”

“Ur-Gilbert and I would appreciate it,” Hercules tells him, only mildly snippy.

Madison’s lips twitch.

More crashing, as a burning white tendril bulldozes through the columns of the Second Bank. The stone of the portico crumbles and rolls down the granite steps.

Madison grabs their wrists.

“Gilbert? You will have the ability to create portals, like Thomas does. You need to make an entrance and an exit. You can travel through them, or you can use them to move objects.”

Madison’s eyes shift to Hercules. “Your powers are more complicated. You can _create_. Ghosts of things, like the horse you saw me make. Or real things. But do not overdo the last. You will exhaust yourself rapidly. Whatever you create must make sense in context: you are suggesting to the fabric of reality that something _should_ exist.”

“So… so if I wanna make a horse, I can’t just whip one up out of thin air. It’s gotta be attached to a carriage. Or a saddle. Or horse shoes.”

“Or horse manure.” Madison smirks. “Creativity will save your life.”

 _Anything you imagine, you can create from cloth_.

Hercules sucks in a sharp breath. That was—

Madison closes his eyes and _twists_. There’s no physical motion but Hercules can feel it, a glacier growing at the root of his spine, locking into the ball joints of his hips and then punching upward to rake his flanks and his lungs, his throat, the hinge of his jaw, sockets of his eyes, maybe they should have _asked_ —

He wakes up tucked below a flower bush. Gil is groaning beside him. His mouth tastes like ash.

Madison and Jefferson are gone.

 _You trust too easy to be a spy_ , his brother used to say. But Hercules had never before guessed wrong about a person. He pulls himself to his knees, staying low and watching the sky.

Oily black smoke billows out of the streets, and there’s Madison, arms outstretched as white tendrils slam the ground around him. A car to his right explodes into flames, drops through the ground and reappears from a portal a hundred feet up to erupt against one of the creature’s legs. It goes up in flames as though doused in crude oil, thrashes and withers and retracts toward the sky. Jefferson blinks out and reappears and blinks out again, dragging flaming oil with him through each portal and dropping it on the creature.

But more pillar-like arms are crawling through the tear in the sky. Hundreds more. Some launch at the ground, ripping and smashing toward the flash and smoke of Madison and Jefferson. Many others pick and peel at the edges of the rip. The burr presses toward them from the other side, too large still. _For now_.

Madison turns a piece of Second Bank column into an enormous driving spike all made of quivering grey light, and Jefferson portals three arms right into its path. But even three at a time, they’re not taking this thing out fast enough.

Then Gil says, “Is that Burr?” and Hercules wrenches around.

There’s a man all in grey on the steps of Independence Hall, with a pile of daffodil-yellow cloth at his feet.

“I didn’t want to be right about this,” Hercules muttered. He flattens his lips. “Gil. Can you get us over there?”

Lafayette opens his mouth. Closes it. Holds out a hand the way he’s seen Jefferson do it. In front of his palm the world sparkles, flickers, dims, then turns milky-silver. A portal stabilizes at the tips of his fingers.

“Holy shit,” Gil breathes. His other arm flashes out toward Independence Hall and a portal quivers to life ten feet from Burr. Hercules can see Burr’s head turn toward it, but he doesn’t otherwise react.

“Are we gonna live if we go through that thing?” Hercules asks. Gil gives him an exaggerated shrug. “Right,” Hercules says, and jumps.

The world twists and he’s feet from Burr; sleek, incomplete Burr, with the cold of the void in his dark eyes. The yellow cloth at his feet is Peggy in her coat, eyes closed, breathing hard.

 _That_ , Hercules was not expecting. He hears Lafayette suck in a sharp breath.

“Hello, Hercules.”

“Burr,” Hercules calls him, and sees him smile wider. “I was… I was going to ask if you were okay. But,” he nods to Peggy. “That’s my friend there. Why do you have her?”

Burr’s smile twitches and fades. “I thought she was someone else. It can be difficult,” he adds, wry, “to tell you all apart. I’m learning, though.” Hercules jets out a breath as though he’s been punched, but Burr holds up a hand. “She’s alright. I don’t have any reason to hurt her, since it will all come to the same end anyway.” He nods at the sky.

Briefly, their eyes meet and Hercules feels that cold again, the one he felt that night in front of the shop, the same cold he feels when he looks at the sky. Warm air rushes into his lungs a moment later — Burr has looked away.

Hercules swallows. “Are you the one doing all this?”

Burr shrugs, eloquent. “I’m something of a projection, really. Scoping things out, if you will. And it was nice, walking about. I’ve spent thirty years waiting, alone, in a void.” He looks down at Peggy. “For a while, I thought maybe she would come back and get me.” He huffs. “Well. Now I’m chasing what I want.”

Lafayette hisses. “It sounds like you’re going to hurt me and my friends.”

Burr’s expression folds closed. “It won’t hurt.” Lafayette shifts, one foot back, ready. Burr raises an eyebrow at him.

“Let us help,” Hercules says. “Maybe there’s another way.”

Burr’s eyes slip to the side. He frowns.

A car smashes behind Hercules, streaming metal guts, a tailpipe twisted like innards as white acrid smoke spills from the hood. Lafayette lunges for Peggy as Madison and Jefferson appear in the air, arms up.

Burr whips around and tendrils fly out of his hands, punching Lafayette back. Hercules shouts as Gil rolls clear across the street.

“Who the hell is that!” Jefferson yelps, and— don't they know?

A mass of white-light writhing arms streak toward them from Burr. The thing in the sky whines again, window rattling, the sound swallowing the world.

And— Hercules isn’t going to get used to the way gravity seesaws as he drops out of a portal onto a rooftop.

Madison and Jefferson fall out behind him, and then Gil appears a moment later, groaning on the ground. Hercules surges toward him. James grabs Hercules’s arm, stopping him. The whine churns to silence.

“Who was that?”

“He’s… I’ve met him a few times now. He introduced himself as Burr.”

Madison’s eyes go big. He lets go. Hercules runs to Gil, who is trembling faintly.

“We have to kill it,” James says. “This is worse than we thought.”

“It’s a fucking _person_!” Hercules snarls, petting Gil’s hair back from his face.

“It’s not a person. At best, it is an amalgamation of bits and pieces of different people.”

“It had Maria,” Jefferson says suddenly. “That was her, at his feet.”

“No,” Gil groans, “that was our friend Peggy. And she was in danger because Burr thought she was someone else. Someone from _your_ world.” The accusation is heavy.

“There is no time for this,” James says, voice low. “If that creature breaks free into this reality, there will be no putting it _back_. And we do not have an army to fight for us.”

A rasping wail splits the sky, and tendrils spill out of the sky like a tide rolling in. Too many, far too many, and in their midst is an eely snout, narrow and wedge-shaped while twining white and red twist like an oil-slick over its skin. It noses back and forth, forcing the tear open wider. Thomas gives a sickly whine, throws up a hand and teleports them off the roof, into the thin city trees behind Independence Hall, where they huddle out of sight beside the statue of Commodore Barry.

“Can we… can we hit that thing? Will it do any good?”

“Yeah,” Thomas says, “but we don’t have enough firepower to do any real damage.”

“Oh,” Lafayette breathes, and, raps his knuckles on his thigh, and grabs Jefferson’s hand. “But I have an idea.” He looks at Hercules. “I think you will like it. We’re probably going to die, but it might work.”

“I won’t like it if you _die_ ,” Hercules yelps.

“Do you trust me?”

“Of course. It’s just.” He licks his lips.

“How dangerous is this?”

“Well,” Gil says, “if we can pull it off, it’s going to involve a lot of standing in one place making a target of ourselves.”

“Right,” Madison says, and then leans in and catches Jefferson by the scruff of his neck and kisses him. They bend into one another, arms winding, and then, just as suddenly, pull apart.

“Is this— was that a dramatic ‘just in case we die’ kiss?” Thomas says. His tone is flippant, but there’s a kernel of panic blooming wide white in his eyes. “Because remember we always make fun of it when they do that in the movies—”

James kisses him again. Thomas sinks into it, and then keeps talking, murmuring into James’s mouth, “And the, mm, kiss-to-shut-you-up-mm—”

Hercules feels— odd watching them. Like a voyeur but hot and exposed because that, that’s not something he ever let himself imagine, but if he _had_ …

Nervous, embarrassed, he dares a look at Gil.

Who exclaims, “Would you like to date me?”

“ _What_?”

“If we make it out of this alive? Ah, it’s just… I really like you. I’m not sure I’ve ever liked someone this much. And I was too ashamed to ask, after I misled you. I stayed in America for weeks trying to figure out how to fix it, and I thought— I thought that, perhaps, you liked me too. Maybe— Maybe we won’t have whatever they have, but maybe we will,” he says, and swings an arm toward James and Thomas, who have stopped kissing and are staring at them, both looking faintly embarrassed. “If you want,” Gil mutters, shrugging. “Maybe.”

Hercules gawps at him, then snaps his mouth closed and exhales.

“Make it out of this alive,” he orders. “Then you and I are gonna sit down and figure it all out. Okay?” He smiles at Laf, grabs his hand and squeezes.

“Okay,” Lafayette says, eyes lighting. “ _Okay_. Thomas, I need your help.” Then, without waiting, he throws up a portal and disappears. Thomas touches James’s cheek with just the tips of his fingers, then turns, and follows Lafayette.

James turns to Hercules. His small smile dies. Above them, thousands of tendrils writhe and turn.

“I want to handle Burr,” Hercules says.

Madison frowns. “Have you even used your powers yet?”

Hercules drops his chin.

“I’ll deal with Burr,” Madison says.

“No. I want to try something first.”

“You’re going to try to appeal to the sensibilities of an unreasoning animal, and you’ll get yourself killed. And then where will you be with Gilbert?”

Hercules twitches. Apparently, alternate-him is an utter bastard. “I’m not sure I can look him in the eye if I let you go kill Burr, so take your pick.” Madison’s expression doesn’t change, he doesn’t look away or blink, but something tells Hercules that was a direct hit. Time to press an advantage. “At least let me try.”

This time Madison does look away. He opens his mouth, closes it and then whispers, “ _What_.”

Hercules follows his gaze to the southern edge of the park.

There’s a milky, jade-limned portal there, as tall and wide as a building. Emerging slowly from its mouth is a towering wedge of blood red and winter-grey steel, six stories tall, its shadow falling over the entirety of the park. The leading edge hits dirt with a rushing roar, plowing an immense trench deep in soil as trees shred and snap, ground to splinters beneath this monstrous heel as the air comes thick with the scent of river water.

The nose of the Battleship New Jersey emerges, massive raking guns pointed toward the sky. Lafayette is perched upon the bow, high in the air, wind thrashing his coat around him as the forward half of the ship rolls out of the portal before hissing in a spray of stony soil to a halt. Hercules can see his grin from here.

“I brought you guns!” he bellows, looks down at his feet, thumps his fist to his chest, and adds, “And a ship!”

“Holy shit,” Madison breathes.

“I think I might love that man,” Hercules tells him.

“Good.”

Lafayette vanishes and reappears beside them. “Thomas is on the other side, holding that part of the portal open. We can’t bring it all the way through or it will tip over — the water on the other side is stabilizing it. Somehow. Honestly this probably shouldn’t work but I’m not asking questions. But I need you two to magic up some missiles, because it turns out that retired battleships are not armed.”

“We can do that,” Madison says.

“Can you do it alone?” Hercules asks.

Lafayette glances between them. He says, “You are going to talk to Burr, aren’t you?”

“I’ve got to try,” Hercules tells him, defiant.

But Gil only nods. “If that is what you think is right, I trust you. Now, go!”

The earth punches up as a white tendril the width of a golf cart crushes into the park beside them.

Madison lifts his arms and the barrel of one gun flashes thready-gray and punches a hole through the tendril. The end falls to the ground and the creature in the sky screams, terrible and tremendous.

There’s no more hiding. The attack comes all at once, blazing white tendrils thudding down one after another, dragging along the ground and yanking back and pounding down again, and Hercules runs, runs back toward Independence Hall, back toward Burr. The guns of the ship bellow and the creature screams, he can’t hear himself think, can only smell acrid smoke and dirt and oil and the river. He ducks past the bell tower of Independence Hall, which is ringing again, low and haunting, then around the western edge of the Hall, and Burr is there, surrounded by gleaming white arms.

He doesn’t see more than that — something uproots the sky. He’s upside down before his back slams the ground, air punching out of his lungs ahead of a shout. Cobbles churn under the thick shoulders of his coat before momentum carries him over backward just to crash into a brick wall and stop hard.

Philadelphia spins, ringing. Has someone ironed his lungs flat? He wheezes, and tips back his head.

Burr stands over him.

“It will all be over soon. You don’t need to feel any pain.”

Pressing a hand to the wall, Hercules get his knees under him, then his feet, staggering just a little. “Then don’t hurt me. I just want to talk.”

“Talk less.” An arm lashes out, slaps him like a doll across the street into the grass plot beside the Liberty Bell. He stares, watching white light whip across the spinning sky, waits for feeling to return to his legs and then claws again to his feet. Something is wrong with his ribs. _No time_. He staggers back across the road, to Burr, and to the limp yellow bundle lain carefully at the top of the steps of the Hall.

He holds his arms out, placating. Burr stares at him. The sour scent of the roaring guns clogs Hercules’s nostrils.

“What was it you wanted me to make you?” he asks. “I don’t think it was a shirt. Though I do still think you’d look good in burgundy.”

Burr huffs a faint laugh. Now that Hercules looks, he can see the edges of him hang like the loose, unfinished thread of the sky. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to happen now,” he says, and points.

Hercules staggers, dazed, under a booming _crack_ of sound, like the world breaking.

The eel-snout above, a hundred feet tall, wrenches at last through the tear in the universe. Blazing slick color pools over its skin as a serpentine neck follows, slithering and tearing and tearing and tearing, the world turning to tatters as it thrashes. A great clawed foot catches on the edge of the widening tear. Threads of sky swirl in the wind as they flutter to the ground, cut loose. The earth rattles under their feet, buildings swaying. Dust billows and a fire hydrant cracks open, water geysering into the air. The world tastes like gasoline and sour terror.

Burr, when he looks back at him, is shuddering, the mass of arms behind him slapping at the earth.

“‘Anything you imagine, you can create from cloth.’ That’s what you said to me,” Hercules tells him. “What is it you want me to make?”

Burr’s expression crumples. His hand whips out, and Hercules squeezes his eyes closed. _You’re bricks_ , he thinks at the sidewalk. _You could be a wall ohgodplease_.

The blow never lands.

The blow never lands, because there’s a wall in front of Hercules, thick and wide and all red brick.

_Holy fucking shit that actually worked._

The wall shatters. The sky is dissolving and Burr is over Hercules, grey and grey and grey except for the white chipped light in his eyes.

 _Be a wall!_ he thinks at the ground, too late, and white crashing light strikes him, full across the chest.

The world whites out. Cold-hard-breaking and then something rings and rings and rings, high and eerie. He puts a hand behind him and feels cold sloping metal and a long fissure. Hot iron pools his mouth. His vision is swimming, grey-grey-grey at the corners, but he can still see bronze, a bell that is torn but still whole. An inscription: _Proclaim Liberty Throughout All The Land Unto All The Inhabitants Thereof_.

Burr is above him, limned by the light of the torn-cloth end of the world, coat in tatters. _I could fix that for you_ , Hercules thinks, and reaches out a hand. The hem of Burr joins neatly under the thread of his imagination. _With my needle, I can make anything_.

Burr gasps, and staggers. The thing in the sky screams.

“What are you doing?”

“I know what you want me to make you.” There, and there, and there, the places where Burr is incomplete, threads trailing back to the creature in the sky, to the infinite empty shroud between universes. Hercules pulls the threads, long and blazing white, towing the creature behind them and it shrinks, bends and warms and fills Burr, and Hercules folds it under all the torn edges and stitches around it, finishes neatly. _You can hardly even see where it’s torn._

Tears glisten down Burr’s cheeks. He's smiling. “What are you _doing_?”

“Making you,” Hercules, says, and ties off the thread, and the world goes out.


	2. Epilogue

“Nice belt.”

Lafayette smiles, helpless and happy, and sags against Hercules, hooking their elbows. “You like it? I know a guy, he can do anything.”

“Can he do this?” Hercules kisses him. He’ll never get tired of kissing him. When he pulls away Gil looks dazed. Hercules will never get tired of that, either.

Gil leans in again, murmurs against his lips, “He can do that better than anyone.”

“Bring us back something to eat tonight,” Thomas calls from where he’s hunched over Hercules’s kitchen table, nose buried in an iPad and several notebooks of scrawled, incomprehensible notes. Trying to find a way home, he said — apparently, whatever he did to get here is more complicated than just flinging a portal. Hercules doesn't dislike Thomas, exactly, but he can't help hoping he leaves sooner rather than later. If only because he's constantly underfoot.

“There’s mac n cheese in the cabinet,” Hercules drawls.

Thomas looks up. “But what’ll I eat it with when I don’t have my plastic GI Joe fork and matching plate? _No_. Isn’t there grown-up food anywhere? Presumably _somebody_ over the age of twelve lives here.”

Underfoot, and constantly asking for a foot up the ass. Gil, Hercules knows, can be just as biting but always with a wink and a grin that invited you to laugh along. Thomas was... not that. Still, Gil looks benignly amused, and it’s not worth it. Besides, for all of Thomas’s faults, he and his unnerving habit of appearing and disappearing, teleporting even across small rooms apparently just for dramatic effect, are not the problem. 

The problem is on Hercules’s couch, his face set in tense lines, his hands claws at he stares at his own tidy notes.

“Any closer to finding Burr?” Gil asks, carefully neutral. 

James frowns. “Somehow, you have made him human. Mostly.” Madison is never anything less than polite, but his eyes on Hercules are too keen, searching. “So he cannot have gone far,” he finishes. Which is not an answer, but Hercules doubts Lafayette was expecting one. His voice is dark as he adds, “We’ll find him before we find a way to return, I’m sure.” 

“Right. We’ll keep our eyes peeled,” Hercules tells him.

“Hercules,” Gil says with a grin, “take me out on our date?”

“Right,” Hercules says. “Don’t wait up.”

(As the door closes, he hears: “I still cannot believe your name is Hercules.”

“My name is James Madison.”)

They eat, and then wander Old City arm in arm in the snow. Gil murmurs to him in French, patiently helping Hercules build his vocabulary.

When they reach the tailor shop Burr is there, with a palmful of cranberries the same color as his scarf. Cooper eats them, one at a time, right out of his hand. Burr stands when he sees them coming.

“How did it go?” Gil asks.

Burr smiles, faintly. “Your tailoring does wonders,” he says. “I got the job.”

Hercules claps his arm.

Burr opens his mouth. Closes it. Shakes his head.

“Thank you,” he begins, but Hercules holds up a hand.

There’s still an edge of cold in Burr’s eyes, something that Hercules can feel through his layers. Different somehow from the winter chill. He can move things with his mind, Hercules knows. 

It doesn’t matter.

“Go, get some rest tonight. Tell Peggy we said ‘Hi.’ I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Once I’m done with Cooper,” Burr promises, but he clasps hands with them both before they turn away.

Lafayette leans against his side. “I hear they have reopened tours of the Battleship New Jersey. The last one of the day is in a few minutes.” He grins, and wiggles a hand, a portal forming. “Think we can make it?”

Hercules tugs him close. “We can make anything.”

**Author's Note:**

> Side note: Peggy was supposed to have a much larger role and got horribly sidelined in the name of running out of time. I'mma write her a nice fic to make up for it when I've recovered.
> 
> If you liked the fic then please kudos, review, and visit me on tumblr @ [MenaceAnon](http://www.menaceanon.tumblr.com)! 
> 
> Peace!


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